Innovation and Collaboration

Projects and events

White Rose Libraries AI Network

Having identified Artificial Intelligence as an area of shared interested and potential innovation, the Innovation and Collaboration Board established the WRL AI network to facilitate knowledge sharing between colleagues across Leeds, Sheffield and York, identify potential opportunities for collaboration around AI across different contexts, and deliver specific projects, activities or events in the area of AI. This group is particularly focused on opportunities within customer service and metadata.

White Rose Library Shared Experience Days

As part of wider conversations about staff development at the University library in York, library staff made requests for visits, tours and knowledge exchange opportunities with the library teams at the partner White Rose libraries in Leeds and Sheffield. Currently, the Board are exploring the potential for Shared Experience days, using the collaboration to share knowledge and experience across the three sites. These would allow cross-institutional colleagues to share areas of achievement and expertise, as well as identifying training or development needs where the sites may be able to support each other.

White Rose Libraries OER Network

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open licence. The Innovation and Collaboration board established a project in 2021 to identify areas of good practice in OER, encourage academic engagement with OER, and create an advocacy Toolkit for use by all three institutions to support academic staff who want to use or create OER. The White Rose Libraries OER Group was established to this purpose, to oversee the ongoing development and promotion of the WRL OER Toolkit at the three parent institutions and assess new opportunities to collaborate further in this area.

Open Educational Resource Toolkit

Developed by the WRL OER network, this toolkit from the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York provides information and tools to help faculty and library staff to understand, engage with, and sustain OER in their work and practice. The advantages of OER include reduction in cost, greater flexibility than commercial textbooks, immediate access, enhancement of regular course content, adaptability, and diversity. For more information, access the WRL OER toolkit online.

Collaborative Collection Management

In April 2016 White Rose Libraries worked closely with OCLC/SCS to trial their GreenGlass tool in order to compare print monograph collections with a view to collaborative collection management. The White Rose Libraries Collaborative Collection Management Group led on the project and gained significant value from working with GreenGlass: manipulating data and visualising aspects of collections.

However, the group concluded that the level of overlap between the three collections was much smaller than anticipated and there would be no practical benefit to be gained from a White Rose collaborative collection management arrangement. The project also delivered unexpected benefits in allowing the WRL to make a significant contribution to the national debate on collaborative collection management and the National Knowledge Base project. Our ground-breaking analysis work was part funded by JISC and the results are presented in the JISC report: Understanding collections overlap final report July 2017 (link will open as a PDF document) produced by White Rose Libraries in July 2017.